Did you Know that I loved You Part 1
Did you know, that I loved you.
It might as well begin at the broken security kiosk on the corner of North UIC’s campus, across the street from a donut shop with flashing neon that could only manage to suggest a growing oval shape that in no discernable way actually resembled a donut. The short circuit running the inner leg of the hard plastic structure, fused and short circuited from its repetitive winter hex, the endless dance of frozen, thaw, frozen, thaw that seems to be the Darwinian force of the inorganic, has now become the unintended force of impact. And this embryo just begins its long trek to the continuous, permanent, blue flashing bulb atop the fixture. The siren silenced months ago by an apt mechanic who was told that law forbid him from disconnecting the device but could not pay him enough to fix it so as a compromise with reality, the beacon was left illuminated, blinking and charging under the excitement of solar energy during the day, blinking and waning under the pressure of compensation for one lost sense at night. And the tiny light on a board far away still clung to its job as well, though this one had long been covered with a strip of duct tape that also held down the switch that signaled to the rest of the security system that all was well.
Sean passed the blinking kiosk several times during his shift, his vacant light often advertising his empty back seats. Being a small college town with a single cluster of bars, there wasn’t much demand for public transportation beyond the simple bus routes. But Sean had found the blinking light to be a popular meeting spot for students, overly dressed, stinking of cheap oily fragrances and painted faces that screamed a desperate search for validation and to anyone that matters, ‘I have no taste.’ But a single trip with four or more passengers was a good fare, often times through the dense downtown traffic of a Friday night that gave Sean time to see just how impatient children can be.
Sean knew of style and taste. His entire wardrobe had been deliberately selected to represent wealth and class by his ex-wife. Because the man behind the veil of elegance was far too common and rudimentary to accompany what would have surely been of nobility, perhaps a princess in medieval times. And one day, perhaps she realized that shopping for her husband was too much of a stereotype, that Barby’s shop for their Kens, not women, strong, worldly women, or she finally had heard enough of her girlfriends call him a hick and a farmboy that she no longer appeared in Sean’s life. But it wasn’t even her absence that he had realized. She sometimes went weeks without any word. Work conferences that were such thickly clouded lies that anyone that gave a shit would have confronted her, demanding the truth, years before. But rather it was the dirty dishes and disarray beginning to accumulate that finally told Sean that his maid had departed, along with his princess, for good.
Despite her infidelity and the eventual legal divorce that financially left Sean with far less than he had when they met, Sean was grateful for her meticulous art of disguise, the way she showed him how to manipulate his appearance and every night, driving his leased orange carriage, devoid of any noise save the engine beneath the hood and the cries of other motorists, Sean donned a pressed suit, carefully manufactured to hide a taxi driver. She had taught him the power, mystique, and almost reverence that style simply demanded. Not just demanded but seized, often leaving the victim bewildered, unable to coalesce this cab driver with any schema they had devised. Sean loved that look, always in the second glance, causing that second glance after the common first that falls somewhere between a passing glance and complete lack of sight. That look where a front, or sometimes even back passenger tried to understand why they suddenly felt such respect for what had already been tried and convicted as disdained. And though it usually resulted in a lesser gratuity, if any at all, Sean most enjoyed those who felt threatened, angered at the offense, or disturbance, and became short, demanding he turn on the radio, change the shitty station, open the window, or even the young adult who proclaimed that he sat, cramped with five other passengers, in the shittiest cab in _____, because body heat and alcohol can sometimes be too much for a cheap air conditioning unit. Even that stylistically destroyed boy empowered Sean. He had stolen something and he had affected the world.
And the blinking light served more than just a good fare spot for Sean. He preferred it because beyond its magnet for large fares, it had its own subtle style. It brightly proclaimed that even simple devices can be ironic, can alter their abstract defining purpose from one of antisocial to social. Sean knew nothing of short circuits or capacitors and resistors, only of defiance, and defiance was gorgeous.
Just north, along the Atlantic shore, the same weather that had centuries before killed half of George Washington’s troops, outlined the beach with snow that, when contacting skin, causes pain faster than an open flame. And the waves retained a thickened froth that was neither ice nor water due to the enthalpic battle between the freezing temperatures and constant tidal motion that prevented the crystal alignment of water molecules. A temperature that was cold enough to overcome the ocean’s high salt content ability to prevent it from freezing. Instead, the oceans capacity to continue through those winters came entirely from the moon. Because on the coldest days the sole protector of earth and its inhabitants is that simple lunar companion.
Two hours southwest, inland of the beaches who constant froth resembled a mile-long white scarf, Sean was hailed by two men in their early thirties. And though their breaths were faintly precipitating, they stood, unwavering, both in white brand advertising t-shirts and swimpants, sands, beach towels over their shoulders, and one’s arm was weighted down by what must have been a thoroughly packed blue and white cooler. Jason didn’t even see the blinking light that too shelter just above his head, the combination of bright 6 am sunlight and late winter fog preventing the brilliance of much of his surroundings. He extended his free arm, fingers already blue from the chilling temperature as Sean’s cab approached and the well dressed cab driver barely greeted the two passengers as he and Greg fit into the backseat, the cooler between their practically hypothermic bodies.
The entire scene, their blueish toes, reddening skin, and complete lack of any behavior motivated by routine reaction to a frigid environment was constricting Seans’s chest in a panic attack of dissonance that was only relieved when the two doors had shut completely and the men were inside his taxi and were suddenly more real and less hallucinatory. And the panic subsided more as Jason requested his destination: longshore beach, the unrestrainable shivering that had very much become its own dialect finally confirming that this real person was actually cold, that despite the inexplicable attire and behavior, the event still made sense within the laws of Sean’s universe.
